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July 27, 2003

Apparently, some folks think Harry

Daniel Radosh

Apparently, some folks think Harry Potter should be auditioning for a role on Wizard Eye for the Muggle Guy. I'm not sure about that, but his dreams do indicate a certain tentativeness about his sexuality (or the lack thereof), as well as a touch of castration complex. Here's a quaintly Freudian passage from page 462 that gave me a chuckle (ellipses are in the original):

"Harry dreamed he was back in the D.A. room. Cho was accusing him of luring her there under false pretenses; she said that he had promised her a hundred and fifty Chocolate Frog cards if she showed up. Harry protested... Cho shouted, "Cedric gave me loads of Chocolate Frog cards, look!" And she pulled out fistfuls of cards from inside her robes and threw them into the air, and then turned into Hermione, who said, "You did promise her, you know, Harry.... I think you'd better give her something else instead.... How about your Firebolt?" And Harry was protesting that he could not give Cho his Firebolt because Umbridge had it, and anyway the whole thing was ridiculous, he'd only come up to the D.A. room to put up some Christmas baubles shaped like Dobby's head..."

This brings up a related matter, which is that while the American edition of Order of the Phoenix hasn't been translated as heavily as the previous books, at least one phrase simply had to be rewritten, if only since we now know how personally Harry would have taken it if he'd been confused. In the U.K. version, George says, "Fred and I managed to keep our peckers up somehow." In the U.S. edition, it's "spirits."

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